Director – Josh Cooley, Screenplay – Andrew Barber, Gabriel Ferrari & Eric Pearson, Story – Andrew Barber & Gabriel Ferrari, Producers – Michael Bay, Aaron Dem, Tom DeSanto, Lorenzo di Bonavntura, Don Murphy & Mark Vahradian, Head of Cinematography – Christopher Batty, Music – Brian Tyler, Animation – Industrial Light & Magic, Visual Effects Supervisors – Frazer Churchill & Alex Prichard, Animation Supervisors – Kim Doi & Stephen King, Production Design – Jason Scheier. Production Company – Hasbro Entertainment/New Republic Pictures/di Bonaventura Pictures/Bay Films.
Voices
Chris Hemsworth (Orion Pax/Optimus Prime), Brian Tyree Henry (D-16/Megatron), Scarlett Johansson (Elita-1), Keegan-Michael Key (B-127), Jon Hamm (Sentinel Prime), Laurence Fishburne (Alpha Trion), Steve Buscemi (Starscream), Vanessa Ligouri (Airachnid)
Plot
In the underground city of Iacon on the planet Cybertron, the robots Orion Pax and his best friend D-16 work mining Energon. The leader Sentinel Prime returns from an expedition to the surface to fight off the invading Quintessons, along with his ongoing search for The Matrix of Leadership that was created by the original Cybertronian leader Primus. The Iacon 5000 race is held in celebration but Orion sneaks onto the track and joins in with D-16, even though they are miners without cogs therefore not Transformers. In punishment, they are assigned to the incinerators on the lowest level where they meet the oddball B-127. Among B-127’s dead robots, they find a chip that holds directions to the whereabouts of the defeated Primes. They break out aboard a cargo train to the surface, where they inadvertently drag along Elita-1, their now demoted mining supervisor. On the surface, they reactivate the one remaining Prime who tells a very different story of how Sentinel Prime betrayed them to the Quintessons and that they are in fact mining the Energon to pay them. Enraged at what has happened, Orion and D-16 determine to take the truth back to Iacon city.
Subsequent to Michael Bay dropping out of the franchise – well not entirely, he is still a credited producer here and Transformers One is produced through his company, which is alternately billed as Bay Films or Bayhem Films on the opening film’s credits – the Transformers series has been seeking new direction. Bumblebee (2018) was a sweet attempt to create a film about a girl and friend who happens to be a Transformer; while Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023) went for the diversity angle. Transformers One opts for animation, which is ironic given that the Transformers derived from animated tv series Transformers (1984-7) and it now seems as though the film series is traveling full circle.
Direction has been placed in the hands of Josh Cooley. Cooley started as a story artist at Pixar, before co-writing the screenplay for Inside Out (2015). He made his directorial debut at Pixar with Toy Story 4 (2019). Transformers One is his second film as director. This marks one of the occasions where Industrial Light and Magic was hired not as a visual effects facility but as an animation studio – the previous cases were Rango (2011) and Strange Magic (2015).
Transformers One is a Transformers origin story of sorts. While the background of who the Transformers are and where they come from has been covered in the various series, this essentially gives us the origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron and how the Autobots and Decepticons were formed. There are some claims that other characters in the film are meant to evolve into other familiar characters, but I didn’t see any indications of such – although it may well be that the film was set up with the intention of creating a string of Transformers animated films.
(l to r) D-16 and Orion Pax in Iacon City
I have zero investiture in the Transformers franchise. The mythology of who is who, why sides are fighting and the different variants on Transformers does nothing for me. Not to decry those who are into it. There is a certain mindless fun watching Michael Bay’s massive outlay of special effects mass destruction but that is the sum total of my engagement with the Transformers films. Thus I am the wrong audience for a film like Transformers One and its telling of where their enmity originated from.
Even that said, Transformers One does a fairly lame job in telling such an origin story. The problem is that the film places no effort into believably imagining an alien world inhabited by giant robots that can transform into vehicles. All we really get is a fairly ordinary drama – a story about exploited working stiffs that dream of more than their station in life and, upon discovering the corruption of the leaders, conduct a revolution to bring the system down – but one that plays out with robots instead of people. All we get are regular everyday things but with robot names slapped on them – a coal mining operation except it is called Energon; the Transformers engage in a vehicle race that is called the Iacon 5000.
There are things about the world that make no real sense – why would robots have genders such as a Scarlett Johansson-voiced machine who has a very female form? Why would machines on another planet transform into the types of vehicles designed for a human world? There is the rather absurd notion of a train system where the track manifests in mid-air with nothing supporting in front of the carriage – the potential for things to go wrong here seems unimaginable. And the epic rivalry between Autobots and Decepticons all apparently comes down to being no more than a standard friends-to-enemies character arc, which seems rather absurd when you consider it is something an entire planet goes to war over.
The animation in Transformers One is of an expectedly high quality. There is colour and imagination gone into the Transformer city and the surface of Cybertron. And the film choreographs some snappy Transformer fight scenes – it is not as much fun as watching them take place in live-action but the scenes zip along. If only the film hadn’t had so little imagination go into its world.
